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THE DANCE OF THE CHANGER AND THE THREE
Terry Carr
This all happened ages ago, out in the depths of space beyond
Darkedge, where galaxies lumber ponderously through the
black like so many silent bright rhinoceroses. It was so long
ago that when the light from Loarr's galaxy finally reached
Earth, after millions of light-years, there was no one here to
see it except a few things in the oceans that were too mind-
lessly busy with their monotonous single-celled reactions to
notice.
Yet, as long ago as it was, the present-day Loarra still re-
member this story and retell it in complex, shifting wave-dances
every time one of the newly-changed asks for it. The wave-
dances wouldn't mean much to you if you saw them, nor I
suppose would the story itself if I were to tell it just as it
happened. So consider this a translation, and don't bother
yourself that when I say "water" I don't mean our hydrogen-
oxygen compound, or that there's no "sky" as such on Loarr,
or for that matter that the Loarra weren'taren'tcreatures
that "think" or "feel" in quite the Way we understand. In fact,
you could take this as a piece of pure fiction, because there
are damned few real facts in itbut I know better (or
worse), because I know how true it is. And that has a lot to
do with why I'm back here on Earth, with forty-two friends
and co-workers left dead on Loarr. They never had a chance.
There was a Changer who had spent three life cycles plan-
ning a particular cycle climax and who had come to the
moment of action. He wasn't really named Minnearo, but
I'll call him that because it's the closest thing I can write to
approximate the tone, emotional matrix, and associations that
were all wrapped up in his designation.
When he came to his decision, he turned away from the
crag on which he'd been standing overlooking the Loarran
ocean, and went quickly to the personality-homes of three of
his best friends. To the first friend, Asterrea, he said, "I am
going to commit suicide," wave-dancing this message in his
best festive tone.
His friend laughed, as Minnearo had hoped, but only for a
short time. Then he turned away and left Minnearo alone,
because there had already been several suicides lately and it
was wearing a little thin.
To his second friend, Minnearo gave a pledge-salute, going
through all sixty sequences with exaggerated care, and wave-
danced, "Tomorrow I shall immerse my body in the ocean, if
anyone will Watch."
His second friend, Fless, smiled tolerantly and told him he
would come and see the performance.
To his third friend, with many excited leapings and bound-
ings, Minnearo described what he imagined would happen to
him after he had gone under the lapping waters of the ocean.
The dance he went 'through to give this description was
intricate and even imaginative, because Minnearo had spent
most of that third life cycle working it out in his mind. It
used motion and color and sound and another sense some-
thing like smell, all to communicate descriptions of falling,
impact with the water, and then the quick dissolution and
blending in the currents of the ocean, the dimming and loss
of awareness, and finally the awakening, the completion of
'the change. Minnearo had a rather romantic turn of mind,
so he imagined himself recoalescing around the life-mote of
one of Loarr's greatest heroes, Krollim, and forming on
Krollim's old pattern. And he even ended the dance with
suggestions of glory and imitations by others, which was
definitely presumptuous. But the friend for whom the dance
was given did nod approvingly at several points.
"If it turns out to be half what you anticipate," said this
friend, Pur, "then I envy you. But you never know."
"I guess not," Minnearo said, rather morosely. And he
hesitated before leaving, for Pur was what I suppose I'd better
call female, and Minnearo had rather hoped that she would
join him in the ocean jump. But if she thought of it she gave
no sign, merely gazing at Minnearo calmly, waiting for him
to go; so finally he did.
And at the appropriate time, with his friend Fless watching
him from the edge of the cliff, Minnearo did his final wave-
dance as Minnearorather excited and ill-coordinated, but
that was understandable in the circumstancesand then per-
formed his approach to the edge, leaped and tumbled down-
ward through the air, making fully two dozen turns this way
and that before he hit the water.
Fless hurried back and described the suicide to Asterra and
Pur, who laughed and applauded in most of the right places,
so on the whole it was a success. Then the three of them sat
down and began plotting Minnearo's revenge.
All right, I know a lot of this doesn't make sense. Maybe
that's because I'm trying to tell you about the Loarra in
human terms, which is a mistake with creatures as alien as
they are. Actually, the Loarra are almost wholly 'an energy
life-form, their consciousness coalescing in each life cycle
around a spatial center which they call a "life-mote," so that,
if you could see the patterns of energy they form (as I have,
using a sense filter our expedition developed for that pur-
pose), they'd look rather like a spiral nebula sometimes, or
other times like iron filings gathering around a magnet, or
maybe like a half-melted snowflake. (That's probably what
Minnearo looked like on that day, because it's the suicides
and the aged who look like that.) Their forms keep shifting,
of course, but each individual usually keeps close to one
pattern.
Loarr itself is a gigantic gaseous planet with an orbit so
close to its primary that its year has to be only about thirty-
seven Earthstandard Days long. (In Earthsystem, the orbit
would be considerably inside that of Venus.) There's a solid
core to the planet, and a lot of hard outcroppings like islands,
but most of the surface is in a molten or gaseous state, swirl-
ing and bubbling and howling with winds and storms. It's not
a very inviting planet if you're anything like a human being,
but it does have one thing that brought it. to Unicentral's
attention: mining.
Do you have any idea what mining is like on a planet
where most metals are fluid from the heat and/or pressure?
Most people haven't heard much about this, because it isn't
a situation we encounter often, but it was there on Loarr, and
it was very, very interesting. Because our analyses showed
some elements that had been until then only computer-theory
elements that were supposed to exist only in the hearts of
suns, for one thing. And if we could get hold of some of
them . . . Well, you see what I mean. The mining possibilities
were very interesting indeed.
Of course, it would take half the wealth of Earthsystem to
outfit a full-scale expedition there. But Unicentral hummed
for two-point-eight seconds and then issued detailed instruc-
tions on just how it was all to be arranged. So there we
went.
And there I was, a Standard Year later (five Standard
Years ago), sitting inside a mountain of artificial Earth
welded onto one of Loarr's "islands" and wondering what the
hell I was doing there. Because I'm not a mining engineer,
not a physicist or comp-technician or, in fact, much of any-
thing that requires technical training. I'm a public-relations
man; and there was just no reason for me to have been
assigned to such a hellish, impossible, godforsaken, incon-
ceivable, and plain damned unlivable planet as Loarr.
But there was a reason, and it was the Loarra, of course.
They lived ("lived") there, and they were intelligent, so we
had to negotiate with them. Ergo: me.
So in the next several years, while I negotiated and we set
up operations and I acted as a go-between, I learned a lot
about them. Just enough to translate, however clumsily, the
wave-dance of the Changer and the Three, which is their
equivalent of a classic folk-hero myth (or would be if they
had anything honestly equivalent to anything of ours).
To continue:
Fless was in favor of building a pact among the Three by
which they would, each in turn and each with deliberate lack
of the appropriate salutes, commit suicide in exactly the same
way Minnearo had. "Thus we can kill this suicide," Fless
explained in excited waves through the air.
But Pur was more practical. "Thus," she corrected him,
"we would kill only this suicide. It is unimaginative, a thing
to be done by rote, and Minnearo deserves more."
Asterrea seemed undecided; he hopped about, sparking and
disappearing and reappearing inches away in another color.
They waited for him to comment, and finally he stabilized,
stood still in the air, settled to the ground, and held himself
firmly there. Then he said, in slow, careful movements, "I'm
not sure he deserves an original revenge. It wasn't a new
suicide, after all. And who is to avenge us?" A single spark
leaped from him. "Who is to avenge us?" he repeated, this
time with more pronounced motions.
"Perhaps," said Pur slowly, "we will need no revengeif
our act is great enough."
The other two paused in their random wave-motions, con-
sidering this. Fless shifted from blue to green to a bright red
which dimmed to yellow; Asterrea pulsed a deep ultraviolet.
"Everyone has always been avenged," Fless said at last.
"What you suggest is meaningless."
"But if we do something great enough," Pur said; and now
she began to radiate heat which drew the other two reluc-
tantly toward her. "Something which has never been done
before, in any form. Something for which there can be no
revenge, for it will be a positive thingnot a death-change,
not a destruction or a disappearance or a forgetting, even a
great one. A positive thing."
Asterrea's ultraviolet grew darker, darker, until he seemed
to be nothing more than a hole in the air. "Dangerous, dan-
gerous, dangerous," he droned, moving torpidly back and
forth. "You know it's impossible to askwe'd have to give
up all our life cycles to come. Because a positive in the
world . . ." He blinked into darkness, and did not reappear
for long seconds. When he did he was perfectly still, pulsing
weakly but gradually regaining strength.
Pur waited till his color and tone showed that conscious-
ness had returned, then moved in a light wave-motion calcu-
lated to draw the other two back into calm, reasonable
discourse. "I've thought about this for six life cycles already,"
she danced. "I must be rightno one has worked on a prob-
lem for so long. A positive would not be dangerous, no matter
what the three- and four-cycle theories say. It would be
beneficial." She paused, hanging orange in midair. "And it
would be new," she said with a quick spiral.. "Oh, how newl"
And so, at length, they agreed to follow her plan. And it
was briefly this: On a far island outcropping set in the
deepest part of the Loarran ocean, where crashing, tearing
storms whipped molten metal-compounds into blinding spray,
there was a vortex of forces that was avoided by every Loarra
on pain of inescapable and final death-change. The most
ancient wave-dances of that ancient time said that the vortex
had always been there, that the Loarra themselves had been
born there or had escaped from there or had in some way
cheated the laws that ruled there. Whatever the truth about
that was, the vortex was an eater of energy, calling and catch-
ing from afar any Loarra or other beings who strayed within
its influence. (For all the life on Loarr is energy-based, even
the mindless, drifting foodbeastscreatures of uniform dull
color, no internal motion, no scent or tone, and absolutely
no self-volition. Their place in the Loarran scheme of things
is and was literally nothing more than that of food;  even
though there were countless foodbeasts drifting in the air in
most areas of the planet, the Loarra hardly ever noticed them.
They ate them when they were hungry, and looked around
them at any other time.)
"Then you want us to destroy the vortex?" cried Fless,
dancing and dodging to right and left in agitation.
"Not destroy," Pur said calmly. "It will be a h'/e-change,
not a destruction."
"Life-change?" said Asterrea faintly, wavering in the air.
And she said it again: "Li/e-change." For the vortex had
once created, or somehow allowed to be created, the Oldest
of the Loarra, those many-cycles-ago beings who had com-
bined and split, reacted and changed countless times to
become the Loarra of this day. And if creation could happen
at the vortex once, then it could happen again.
"But how?" asked Fless, trying now to be reasonable,
dancing the question with precision and holding a steady
green color as he did so.
"We will need help," Pur said, and went on to explain that
she had heardfrom a windbird, a creature with little intelli-
gence but perfect memorythat there was one of the Oldest
still living his first life cycle in a personality-home somewhere
near the vortex. In that most ancient time of the race, when
suicide had been considered extreme as a means of cycle-
change, this Oldest had made his change by a sort of negative
suicidehe had frozen his cycle, so that his consciousness
and form continued in a never-ending repetition of them-
selves, on and on while his friends changed and grew and
learned as they ran through life cycle after life cycle, becom-
ing different people with common memories, moving forward
into the future by this method while he, the last Oldest,
remained fixed at the beginning. He saw only the begin-
ning, remembered only the beginning, understood only the
beginning.
And for that reason his had been the most tragic of all
Loarran changes (and the windbird had heard it rumored, in
eight different ways, each of which it repeated word-for-word
to Pur, that in the ages since that change more than a hundred
hundred Loarra had attempted revenge for the Oldest, but
always without success) and it had never been repeated, so
that this Oldest was the only Oldest. And for that reason he
was important to their quest, Pur explained.
With a perplexed growing and shrinking, brightening and
dimming, Asterrea asked, "But how can he live anywhere
near the vortex and not be consumed by it?"
"That is a crucial part of what we must find out," Pur said.
And after the proper salutes and rituals, the Three set out to
find the Oldest.
The wave-dance of the Changer and the Three traditionally
at this point spends a great deal of time, in great splashes of
color and bursts of light and subtly contrived clouds of dark-
ness all interplaying with hops and swoops and blinking and
dodging back and forth, to describe the scene as Pur, Fless
and Asterrea set off across that ancient molten sea. I've seen
the dance countless times, and each viewing has seemed to
bring me maddeningly closer to understanding the meaning
that this has for the Loarra themselves. Lowering clouds flash-
ing bursts of aimless, lifeless energy, a rumbling sea below,
whose swirling depths pulled and tugged at the Three as they
swept overhead, darting around each other in complex pat-
terns like electrons playing cat's-cradle around an invisible
nucleus. A droning of lamentation from the changers left
behind on their rugged home island, and giggles from those
who had recently changed. And the colors of the Three
themselves: burning red Asterrea and glowing green Fless
and steady, steady golden Pur. I see and hear them all, but I
feel only a weird kind of alien beauty, not the grandeur,
excitement and awesomeness they have for the Loarra.
When the Three felt the vibrations and swirlings in the air
that told them they were coming near to the vortex, they
paused in their flight and hung in an interpatterned motion-
sequence above the dark, rolling sea, conversing only in short
flickerings of color because they had to hold the pattern
tightly in order to withstand the already-strong attraction of
the vortex.
"Somewhere near?" asked Asterrea, pulsing a quick green.
"Closer to the vortex, I think," Pur said, chancing a
sequence of reds and violets.
"Can we be sure?" asked Fless; but there was no answer
from Pur and he had expected none from Asterrea.
The ocean crashed and leaped; the air howled around them.
And the vortex pulled at them.
Suddenly they felt their motion-sequence changing, against
their wills, and for long moments all three were afraid that it
was the vortex's attraction that was doing it. They moved in
closer to each other, and whirled more quickly in a still more
intricate pattern, but it did no good. Irresistibly they were
drawn apart again, and at the same time the three of them
were moved toward the vortex.
And then they felt the Oldest among them.
He had joined the motion-sequence; this must have been
why they had felt the sequence changed and loosenedto
make room for him. Whirling and blinking, the Oldest led
them inward over the frightening sea, radiating warmth
through the storm and, as they followed, or were pulled along,
they studied him in wonder.
He was hardly recognizable as one of them, this ancient
Oldest. He was . . . not quite energy any longer. He was half
matter, carrying the strange mass with awkward, aged grace,
his outer edges almost rigid as they held the burden of his
congealed center and carried it through the air. (Looking
rather like a half-dissolved snowflake, yes, only dark and
dismal, a snowflake weighed with coal-dust.) And, for now
at least, he was completely silent.
Only when he had brought the Three safely into the calm
of his barren personality-home on a tiny rock jutting at an
angle from the wash of the sea did he speak. There, inside a
cone of quiet against which the ocean raged and fell back,
the sands faltered and even the vortex's power was nullified,
the Oldest said wearily, "So you have come." He spoke with
a slow waving back and forth, augmented by only a dull red
color.
To this the Three did not know what to say; but Pur finally
hazarded, "Have you been waiting for us?"
The Oldest pulsed a somewhat brighter red, once, twice.
He paused. Then he said, "I do not waitthere is nothing to
wait for." Again .the pulse of a brighter red. "One waits for
the future. But there is no future, you know."
"Not for him," Pur said softly to her companions, and
Fless and Asterrea sank wavering to the stone floor of the
Oldest's home, where they rocked back and forth.
The Oldest sank with them, and when he touched down he
remained motionless. Pur drifted over the others, maintaining
movement but unable to raise her color above a steady blue-
green. She said to the Oldest, "But you knew we would
come."
"Would come? Would come? Yes, and did come, and have
come, and are come. It is today only, you know, for me. I
will be the Oldest, when the others pass me by. I will never
change, nor will my world."
"But the others have already passed you by," Fless said.
"We are many life cycles after you, Oldestso many it is
beyond the count of windbirds."
The Oldest seemed to draw his material self into a more
upright posture, forming his energy-flow carefully around it.
To the red of his color he added a low hum with only the
slightest quaver as he said, "Nothing is after me, here on
Rock. When you come here, you come out of time, just as I
have. So now you have always been here and will always be
here, for as long as you are here."
Asterrea sparked yellow suddenly, and danced upward into
the becalmed air. As Fless stared and Pur moved quickly to
calm him, he drove himself again and again at the edge of the
cone of quiet that was the Oldest's refuge. Each t:me he was
thrown back and each time he returned to dash himself once
more against the edge of the storm, trying to penetrate back
into it. He flashed and burned countless colors, and strange
sound-frequencies filled the quiet, until at last, with Pur's
stern direction and Floss's blank gaze upon him, he sank back
wearily to the stone floor. "A trap, a trap," he pulsed. "This
is it,  this is the  vortex itself, we should have  known,  and
we'll never get away."
The Oldest had paid no attention to Asterrea's display. He
said slowly, "And it is because I am not in time that the
vortex cannot touch me. And it is because I 'am out of time
that I know what the vortex is, for I can remember myself
born in it."
Pur left Asterrea then, and came close to the Oldest. She
hung above him, thinking with blue vibrations, then asked,
"Can you tell us how you were born?what is creation?
how new things are made?" She paused a moment, and added,
"And what is the vortex?"
The Oldest seemed to lean forward, seemed tired. His color
had deepened again to the darkest red, and the Three could
clearly see every atom of matter within his energy-field, stark
and hard. He said, "So many questions to ask one question."
And he told them the answer to that question.
And I can't tell you that answer, because I don't know it.
No one knows it now, not even the present-day Loarra who
are the Three after a thousand million billion life cycles.
Because the Loarra really do become different . . . different
"persons," when they pass from one cycle to another, and
after  that  many  changes,  memory  becomes  meaningless.
("Try it sometime," one of the Loarra once wave-danced to
me, and there was no indication that he thought this was
a joke.)
Today, for instance, the Three themselves, a thousand
million billion times removed from themselves but still, they
maintain, themselves, often come to watch the Dance of the
Changer and the Three, and even though it is about them
they are still excited and moved by it as though it were a tale
never even heard before, let alone lived through. Yet let a
dancer miss a movement or color or sound by even the
slightest nuance, and the Three will correct him. (And yes,
many times the legended Changer himself, Minnearo, he who
started the story, has attended these dancesthough often he
leaves after the re-creation of his suicide dance.)
It's sometimes difficult to tell one given Loarra from all the
others, by the way, despite the complex and subtle technolo-
gies of Unicentral, which have provided me with sense filters
of all sorts, plus frequency simulators, pattern scopes, special
gravity inducers, and a minicomp that takes up more than
half of my very tight little island of Earth pasted onto the
surface of Loarr and which can do more thinking and analyz-
ing in two seconds than I can do in fifty years. During my
four years on Loarr, I got to "know" several of the Loarra,
yet even at the end of my stay I was still never sure just who
I was "talking" with at any time. I could run through about
seventeen or eighteen tests, linking the sense-filters with the
minicomp, and get a definite answer that way. But the Loarra
are a bit short on patience and by the time I'd get done with
all that whoever it was would usually be off bouncing and
sparking into the hellish vapors they call air. So usually I just
conducted my researches or negotiations or idle queries,
whichever they were that day, with whoever would pay
attention to my antigrav "eyes," and I discovered that it didn't
matter much just who I was talking with: none of them made
any more sense than the others. They were all, as far as I was
concerned, totally crazy, incomprehensible, stupid, silly, and
plain damn no good.
If that sounds like I'm bitter, it's because I am. I've got
forty-two murdered men to be bitter about. But back to the
unfolding of the greatest legend of an ancient and venerable
alien race:
When the Oldest had told them what they wanted to know,
the Three came alive with popping and flashing and dancing
in the air, Pur just as much as the others. It was all that they
had hoped for and more; it was the entire answer to their
quest and their problem. It would enable them to create, to
transcend any negative cycle-climax they could have devised.
After a time the Three came to themselves and remembered
the rituals.
"We offer thanks in the name of Minnearo, whose suicide
we are avenging," Fless said gravely, waving his message in
respectful deep-blue spirals.
"We thank you in our own names as well," said Asterrea.
"And we thank you in the name of no one and nothing,"
said Pur, "for that is the greatest thanks conceivable."
But the Oldest merely sat there, pulsing his dull red, and
the Three wondered among themselves. At last the Oldest
said, "To accept thanks is to accept responsibility, and in
only-today, as I am, there can be none of that because there
can be no new act. I am outside time, you know, which is
almost outside life. All this I have told you is something told
to you before, many times, and it will be again."
Nonetheless, the Three went through all the rituals of
thanksgiving, performing them with flawless grace and care
color-and-sound demonstrations, dances, offerings of their
own energy, and all the rest. And Pur said, "It is possible to
give thanks for a long-past act or even a mindless reflex, and
we do so in 'the highest."
The Oldest pulsed dull red and did not answer, and after
a time the Three took leave of him.
Armed with the knowledge he had given them, they had no
trouble penetrating the barrier protecting Rock, the Oldest's
personality-home, and in moments were once again alone with
themselves in the raging storm that encircled the vortex. For
long minutes they hung in midair, whirling and darting in
their most tightly linked patterns while the storm whipped
them and the vortex pulled them. Then abruptly they broke
their patterns and hurled themselves  deliberately into the
heart of the vortex itself. In a moment they had disappeared.
They seemed to feel neither motion nor lapse of time as
they fell into the vortex. It was a change that came without
perception or thoughta change from self to unself, from
existence to void. They knew only that they had given them-
selves up to the vortex, that they were suddenly lost in dark-
ness and a sense of surrounding emptiness which had no
dimension. They knew without thinking that if they could
have sent forth sound there would have been no echo, that
a spark or even a bright flame would have brought no reflec-
tion from anywhere. For this was the place of the origin of
life, and it was empty. It was up to them to fill it, if it was
to be filled.
So they used the secret the Oldest had given them, the
secret those at the Beginning had discovered by accident and
which only one of the Oldest could have remembered. Having
set themselves for this before entering the vortex, they played
their individual  parts  automaticallyselfless,  unconscious,
almost random acts such as even non-living energy can.
perform. And when all parts had been completed precisely,
correctly, and at just the right time and in just the right
sequence, the creating took place.
It was a foodbeast. It formed and took shape before them
in the void, and grew and glowed its dull, drab glow until it
was whole. For a moment it drifted there, then suddenly
it  was  expelled  from  the  vortex,  thrown  out  violently  as
though from an explosionaway from the nothingness
within, away from darkness and silence into the crashing,
whipping violence of the storm outside. And with it went the
Three, vomited forth with the primitive bit of life they had
made.
Outside, in the storm, the Three went automatically into
their tightest motion sequence, whirling and blinking around
each other in desperate striving to maintain themselves amid
the savagery that roiled around them. And once again they
felt the powerful pull of the vortex behind them, gripping
them anew now that they were outside, and they knew that
the vortex would draw them in again, this time forever, unless
they were able to resist it. But they found that they were
nearly spent; they had lost more of themselves in the vortex
than they had ever imagined possible. They hardly felt alive
now, and somehow they had to withstand the crushing powers
of both the storm and the vortex, and had to forge such a
strongly interlinked motion-pattern that they would be able
to make their way out of this place, back to calm and safety.
And there was only one way they could restore themselves
enough for that.
Moving almost as one, they converged upon the mindless
foodbeast they had just created, and they ate it.
That's not precisely the end of the Dance of the Changer
and the Threeit does go on for a while, telling of the honors
given the Three when they returned, and of Minnearo's reac-
tion when he completed his change by reappearing around the
life-mote left by a dying windbird, and of how all of the
Three turned away from their honors and made their next
changes almost immediatelybut my own attention never
quite follows the rest of it. I always get stuck at that one
point in the story, that supremely contradictory moment when
the Three destroyed what they had made, when they came
away with no more than they had brought with them. It
doesn't even achieve irony, and yet it is the emotional high-
point of the Dance as far as the Loarra are concerned. In
fact, it's the whole point of the Dance, as they've told me with
brighter sparkings and flashes than they ever use when talking
about anything else, and if the Three had been able to come
away from there without eating their foodbeast, then their
achievement would have been duly noted, applauded, giggled
at by the newly-changed, and forgotten within two life cycles.
And these are the creatures with whom I had to deal and
whose rights I was charged to protect. I was ambassador to a
planetful of things that would tell me with a straight face that
two and two are orange. And yes, that's why I'm back on
Earth nowand why the rest of the expedition, those who
are left alive from it, are back here too.
If you could read the fifteen-microtape report I filed with
Unicentral (which you can't, by the way: Unicentral always
Classifies its failures), it wouldn't tell you anything more
about the Loarra than I've just told you in the story of the
Dance. In fact, it might tell you less, because although the
report contained masses of hard data on the Loarra, plus
every theory I could come up with or coax out of the mini-
comp, it didn't have much about the Dance. And it's only in
things like that, attitude-data rather than I.Q. indices, psych
reports and so on, that you can really get the full impact of
what we were dealing with on Loarr.
After we'd been on the planet for four Standard Years,
after we'd established contact and exchanged gifts and favors
and information with the Loarra, after we'd set up our entire
mining operation and had had it running without hindrance
for over three yearsafter all that, the raid came. One day
a sheet of dull purple light swept in from the horizon, and as
it got closer I could see that it was  a whole  colony of the
Loarra, their individual colors and fluctuations blending into
that single purple mass. I was in the mountain, not outside
with the mining extensors, so I saw all of it, and I lived
through it.
They flashed in over us like locusts descending, and they
hit the crawlers and dredges first. The metal glowed red, then
white, then it melted. Then it was just gas that formed billow-
ing clouds rising to the sky. Somewhere inside those clouds
was what was left of the elements which had comprised
seventeen human beings, who were also vapor now.
I hit the alarm and called everyone in, but only a few
made it. The rest were caught in the tunnels when the Loarra
swarmed over them, and they went up in smoke too. Then
the automatic locks shut, and the mountain was sealed off.
And six of us sat there, watching on the screen as the Loarra
swept back and forth outside, cleaning up the bits and pieces
they'd missed.
I sent out three of my "eyes," but they too were promptly
vaporized.
Then we waited for them to hit the mountain itself . . . half
a dozen frightened men huddled in the comp-room, none of
us saying anything. Just sweating.
But they didn't come. They swarmed together in a tight
spiral, went three times around the mountain, made one final
salute-dip and then whirled straight up and out of sight. Only
a handful of them were left behind out there.
After a while I sent out a fourth "eye." One of the Loarra
came over, flitted around it like a firefly, biinked through the
spectrum, and settled down to hover in front for talking. It
was Pura Pur who was a thousand million billion life cycles
removed from the Pur we know and love, of course, but
nonetheless still pretty much Pur.
I sent out a sequence of lights and movements that trans-
lated, roughly, as, "What the hell did you do that for?"
And Pur glowed .pale yellow for several seconds, then gave
me an answer that doesn't translate. Or, if it does, the transla-
tion is just "Because."
Then I asked the question again, in different terms, and she
gave me the same answer in different terms. I asked a third
time, and a fourth, and she came back with the same thing.
She seemed to be enjoying the variations on the Dance; maybe
she thought we were playing.
Well . . . We'd already sent out our distress call by then,
so all we could do was wait for a relief ship and hope they
wouldn't attack again before the ship came, because we didn't
have a chance of fighting themwe were miners, not a mili-
tary expedition. God knows what any military expedition
could have done against energy things, anyway. While we
were waiting, I kept sending out the "eyes," and I kept talk-
ing to one Loarra after another. It took three weeks for the
ship to get there, and I must have talked to over a hundred
of them in that time, and the sum total of what I was told
was this:
Their reason for wiping out the mining operation was
untranslatable. No, they weren't mad. No, they didn't want
us to go away. Yes, we were welcome to the stuff we were
taking out of the depths of the Loarran ocean.
And, most importantly: No, they couldn't tell me whether
or not they were likely ever to repeat their attack.
So we went away, limped back to Earth, and we all made
our reports to Unicentral. We included, as I said, every bit of
data we could think of, including an estimate of the value of
the new elements on Loarrwhich was something on the
order of six times the wealth of Earthsystem. And we put it
up to Unicentral as to whether or not we should go back.
Unicentral has been humming and clicking for ten months
now, but it hasn't made a decision.